Marketing Automation: Rocket Fuel For Start-Ups

When it comes to automated email marketing for new businesses, there really is no benefit gained from hanging around before you start to collect grow your mailing list and promote your new business venture.

Alongside the obvious social media campaigning that many businesses try during the run up to the launch of their website, automatic email marketing can also create quite the buzz around the products that you will be offering. Let’s take a look at some strategies you could use!

Pre-Launch Campaigns

Pre-Launch campaigns are an affordable way to ensure your business sees a great first month sales run. All it will require is a simple one-page website to tell your future customers a little about your business giving a timeframe of launch date and encouraging prospective customers to subscribe to your mailing list with incentives. Offering sample products, especially to social media influencers, is an excellent way to prove you’re a brand that can be trusted. You’ll often find you’ll receive an array of positive feedback which is going to help create some buzz about your brand.

But before you get to offer these exclusive discounts, you’ll need to know where to find your future subscribers. Every business has its own niche of customers, and once you’ve identified yours it’s time to target them. Whilst social media marketing (SMM) is an entirely different kettle of fish compared to email marketing, never forget that the two work hand in hand: the more exposure your brand gets during pre-launch, the likelier it is that your email subscribers list will grow.

To remain constantly visible and relevant to your new audience, use relatable content on your social media platforms that appeals to your niche. This could be anything from memes to interesting third party articles, but above all else, consumers like to know they will receive a personal touch from your service. Share your vision with your audience, let them get to know and like the people that will be running the company! Once you’re sharing your vision and captivating people with content– and your subscribers list starts to grow– you can start to really think about email marketing automation.

Service Processes

A vital part of developing your new business marketing plans, is reviewing the service process that defines the customer experience. And a big part of the service process is conducted through email! Here’s an example of how email automation could make your service process better as a small business:

The process begins either when a customer signs up for your service/newsletter. Think of the kind of emails you get when you sign up for something: a simple ‘Hello!’, reminding you of your login and info on how often you might expect a newsletter are examples.

Whenever your customers order a product from your site, there are a few emails to send: one to confirm the booking, one to confirm that it’s in the post, one to say that it should have arrived… Amazon are a great example of this in action.

Any time a user makes a change to their account– like changing their address, their username or password– you’re going to want to send an email then, too.

And of course, you’re going to want to send newsletters semi-regularly too. A/B testing would be useful to find out the best frequency for sending out newsletters, because the last thing you want is to put customers off by sending too many!

Each one of these features of a service process is easier with CRM software. But how can you make sure that each email you send, whether it’s automated or not, is up to scratch?

What Makes a Good Automated Email?

Rather than firing off completely generic emails, create a strategy for your email marketing to generate a buzz over your new business.

Here are the top 3 marketing Strategies for your New Business Start Up:

Dynamic Content – Use what you know about your audience to tailor your content to them, and segment your emails to reflect that- which means sending newsletters about family holidays to the 25-35 cohort, for instance, who are more likely to have families to go on holiday with! This form of segmentation can lead to click-through rates being over 60% higher.

Drip Campaigns – Sending a sequence of appropriately timed emails can be extremely effective when it comes to introducing new customers to your business. ‘Drip Campaigns’ are targeted emails that are sent out that can create warm leads whilst helping you stay in regular contact with your customers.

Nurture Campaigns are the perfect way to nurture your leads. These campaigns allow your customers to choose their own journey through your Automated email Campaigns through the use of dynamic content. Nurture Campaigns only take moments to set up and can run for weeks or months at a time, they are proven to be effective in turning lukewarm leads into sales.

Building Traffic Before Launching Your Sales Funnel

Businesses can define the direction of their sales funnels before it’s even been launched by driving traffic to the funnel. This will allow you to develop higher-quality leads from subscribers who instil trust into your brand and your funnel. The first step, is to create an experience that your future consumers will enjoy, as most modern consumers are more interested in the experience in interacting with a company than purchasing the products. A few easy ways to do this include:

Making appearances on podcasts to grab some limelight for your new business.

Guest posting and blogging on websites that feature multiple authors in your niche.

Finding affiliates to drive organic and paid traffic – paying third parties a small commission of your sales is the perfect way to network and get more brand exposure. Affiliate marketing offers broader penetration through the market at low costs; the real bonus, is that you only pay when you see the results!

Website Migration Tips

You have to think about how to direct customers from your old pages to your new ones. If you don’t, you’re going to be losing plenty of traffic. So consider the following tactics:

Make sure that all of your redirects are correct by testing them yourself!

Make sure that all of your fiddly SEO and marketing necessities are properly attended to: XML sitemaps, updating your local business listings and updating your AdWords/other advertising platforms to reflect the new URLs you’re using.

Don’t stop at launch: keep an eye on traffic to see what’s working and what’s not!

Post-Launch Email Automation Prompts

After you have successfully launched your new site, use automated emails to cherry pick your subscribers who haven’t since interacted with your website or made a purchase and let them know your exclusive introductory offers come with a time limit. ‘Last Chance’ emails are highly effective in boosting sales. People hate to feel as though an opportunity to grab an exciting new product at a discounted rate has passed them by.

Now, that’s far from everything we could say about site migration- but it’s a good starting point. Share with us how you got on with migration on our social media page!